The Impending Collision Of Accessibility and RIA

March 20, 2007

At SearchInsider.com Rob Garner writes about the head-on collision between Rich Internet Applications
and their worst enemy, good old accessibility:

The irony is that while Web accessibility is just beginning to appear on the radar screen of corporate America, current mega-trends in enterprise Web design are as far away from meeting accessibility standards as they could possibly be.

It’s no good, you can’t bury your head in the sand any longer, folks! I dunno, those ‘fancy-pants designers’, they want everything looking sexy and exciting these days, don’t they? That was sarcasm, by the way.

Filed under: Accessibility
Posted by Ian on Tuesday, March 20, 2007

3 Comments

  1. So says AlastairC

    Ugh: “the issue of designing accessible, text-based Web sites for the visually impaired”, quoting a Yahoo vs Yahoo topic which at @media included accessibility, “If rich applications are a part of your future, get used to the idea of maintaining two sites.”. Fairly ill informed stuff.

    But then he finishes with “Don’t fret – there are solutions for being both accessible and rich, and your experts will help determine the best solution for your site.”, without saying anything more about it!

    Ironically, because the RIAs he’s talking about are based on HTML or flash, there is good scope for accessibility, but you wouldn’t know that from the article.

    Added March 20, 2007 at 9:37 am

  2. So says Toni Ruckwood

    You can’t deny that the increased awareness of accessibility issues amongst the web development community has led to an upwards trend in compliant web sites.

    With this in mind, and the increase in RIA development, I believe that much of the accessibility work that has gone into web site development will find its way into RIA’s.

    This is something that has never happened with desktop applications.

    Added March 20, 2007 at 10:20 am

  3. So says Bob Easton

    RIAs need not be “their worst enemy.” There are ways of making RIAs somewhat accessible today, at least at the demonstration level. W3C standards development work, under the name of ARIA has already broken significant ground, and through forward looking developers can actually be used with Firefox plus Window Eyes to great extent, and Firefox plus JAWS to slightly less extent. Progress is afoot for RIAs. No word yet from the 800 pound gorilla in Redmond.

    ARIA: http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-aria-roadmap-20060926/

    Added March 21, 2007 at 7:59 pm

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